Comment by sandos

Security scanners won't be "manual in-depth analysis of all new code" or "Just running and seeing it do things", but somewhere in-between - utilizing static analysis/machine learning. It's a cat-and-mouse game, but the attacker adding code that waits X days to run something obfuscated would be another pattern that they could look for.

I think these attackers are unlikely to add a delay in the first place because the chance of their attack being found out before it activates would be too high. They seem to generally work on the assumption that they have a day or so before the package is yanked (e.g: from maintainer noticing their account is compromised) so need to move fast.